Is This Real?
by lyner
Summary: Post S5 finale – just a few incredibly small Philinda moments in Tahiti to explore the weight of everything that has come before.


Phil walked off the rear ramp, duffel bag slung loosely over his shoulder. There was only a little weight to it - some changes of clothes, some memorabilia he pulled off the shelf in a last second of nostalgia. He wasn't sure what he could carry anymore, the slightest things threw him off completely these days. They didn't need much anyway.

He took the few unsteady steps over to Lola. Lola, his first love, gleaming bright red, aware of its ridiculous presence on the otherwise untainted sand. The hot black rubber of her wheels burrowed into the glistening grains, pushing up against little tufts of grass that fought free from the tree line. Several boxes sat in the back seat, ration packs and corks peeking out of their tops. Far off to the East shone the tell-tale glimmer of tin roofs and civilization, but they'd only need blessedly few interruptions to their solitude. In Lola's front seat, leaning with her head tucked against her arm on the passenger side, gazing watchfully through unreadable aviators, sat Melinda May, his second love.

"What would you like to do today?" she said evenly, as the stillness carried her voice over the distance. He smiled, widely and earnestly. The engines behind him came to life in sudden punctuation, and he felt the shudder of the ramp retreating. The mid-afternoon sun carried his smile over the Zephyr's roar.

* * *

She climbed out of the car and came slowly to his side, threading her hand into his. It slipped naturally in place, but she thumbed his palm thoughtfully anyway. She realized she hadn't done this before. Much had passed between them, and yet so little. Anything that had managed to be said was rushed, angry, forlorn, desperate - the raw edges of whatever had managed to spill over into hallways, cockpits, holding cells, and more hallways as they kept their team and planet together, flowing from their well of concern for one another that deepened profoundly by the second.

So she stroked his palm tentatively, then the back of his hand with her fingertips. And they fit. She leaned the rest of her self into him, her head falling onto his shoulder, as the Zephyr flew past overhead.

* * *

She was laughing at a stupid joke, but then she sobered, and sat up slowly to lean over the other side of the deck chair. Her fingers curled gently to grip its edge. He knew he always told the lamest ones, and she always laughed so dutifully, but perhaps he'd finally broken her. He hurriedly searched his mental archives for an even dumber one.

"Is this real?" she asked. And he knew that for her, the resolution was too easy, the outcome too hopeful, the regret too starkly absent. He heard the dread in her voice, the knowing that soon she would wake and the world would be no less imperilled, the girl would still be dead.

He reached towards her arm, but a panic found him first. This sand was so white. The sand was too white. The sun was too high. The wind was too gentle. The leaves too pliant. The waves too peaked. The umbrella too red. Her dress too floral. His hands too strong. Her smiles too quick. He scrambled over onto her chair, reckless with the vertigo that followed.

And then he smelled her, a familiar whiff as he came close. A scent he hadn't known the first time they worked together, but one he discovered over the past few years as they began to share a bus, then a lighthouse, then a bunk. It was the smell of her in the morning, the smell in the curve of her neck, the smell of her embrace. The smell of a quiet he had never known before, that sent a surge of warm emotion through him so effusive and perplexing that defied the logic of bits. And he wrapped his arms around her so that she would know it too, a quiet that even her silence had never afforded her.

* * *

She brushed her hands on her jeans, so that every last grain of sand would be left where they found it; would be left with him. It was important that everything, that she, move on. She hadn't always known the truth of this before, but she had learned a new lesson - to pine, to revisit, to wish this had been longer, would only sully the beautiful with the stain of regret. No, she would move on, and that would honour what they had fallen in and made together. She was grateful. They got more than they thought they would.


End file.
